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Elise
Word of advice: if a guy ever refers to your tit-jobs as “mystical,” don’t be swayed by it. He’s just gonna ghost you the way the guys who don’t wax poetic after sex do.
Don’t get all enamored with the tiny picture of him in the text chat bubble. Don’t develop a Pavlovian butterfly-in-stomach response to the littlebuzz-buzzof your phone’s notifications, hoping it’s another message from him, even after he drops off the edge of the earth, again.
Don’t forgive him when he comes back. Don’t be so happy that you don’t even care what the explanation is.
Don’t spend so many nights at his apartment that all your clothes are in every load of laundry, and you might as well live there, really.
Don’t marry him because no one else has ever made you feel this way.
Don’t love every moment of it when it’s good. Don’t pretend the red flags aren’t there.
Don’t be surprised when it crumbles.
Really, you shouldn’t have kissed him the first time you met, when you stepped into the street, and he pulled you back onto the curb before that car went roaring past. It doesn’t matter that both your hearts were pounding, it was the first of many baddecisions. Maybe it would have been fine if it hadn’t led to said tit-job that evening.
Here’s what you do after your dizzy whirlwind romance drops and shatters you on the ground: you pick up all the pieces.
Move. Cut your hair. Listen to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” until the lyrics are burned into your heart. If he can’t love you now, he will never love you again.
Cut your hair again. Move to some ass-end of nowhere town. Change yourself and your address as many times as it takes to scrub the memory of that idiot girl you used to be out of existence.
She wouldn’t recognize me today. Letting my roots grow all the way out, the nails I stopped biting, the absolute puddle of mustard-colored sweaters I wrap myself in these days.
She would have hoped I knew better by now.
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Elise
I don’t have the energy of a go-for-a-morning-hike person, I just wish I did. I push myself out of bed the fourth time my bladder wakes me up in the night and put on just enough clothes that I’m not shivering my ass off, never mind how goofy the resulting outfit is.
That’s how I wind up outside in the woods when it’s still o’dark-thirty, my hands jammed in my near-nonexistent pockets, because I grabbed the wrong pants.
It’s more than a little foggy out. Sometimes it seems like clouds come down and rest on the mountain for a while, the dim morning light casting the trails in a hazy blue lens.
In three years, I’ve never run into anyone one out here. I’ve spooked deer and raccoons on occasion, but for the most part, the world is still entirely asleep. Hell, I’m pretty much asleep. Sometimes when the trail is straight and level, I walk with my eyes closed for a few paces, like it’ll add up to a little more sleep.
I yawn as a flutter of birds take off some distance away, cawing like they’re mad about something. I don’t think anything of it until I hear a noise, vicious and animal.
Mid-step, I freeze.
My heart is climbing into my throat one thud after another as I turn my head in the slightest amounts, scanning my surroundings much more intently than I had been before.
I don’t know what it is, but I catch something out of the corner of my eye. Even with minimal detail, I can tell it’s a hulking figure of an animal, dark fur.
I swallow and peek over my other shoulder. The trail back is long and winding. I can cut through the woods and get back to the house sooner.
A low growl thrums through the woods and raises all the hair on the back of my neck.
I’m off at a sprint, leaving behind everything I probably should have learned in Scouts about not giving chase to predator animals.
For several seconds, I’m nothing but one harried foot hitting the ground after another, nearly slipping on wet leaves and who knows what else. I’m covering more distance than I thought I would; I can see my backyard in the distance.
There’s a hint of a self-congratulatory feeling that I’m going to be able to get back into my apartment before anything catches up with me.
